In July 2022, sound artist Hannah Kemp-Welch spent a week in Southampton working with dancer and performance artist Gabriel Galvez.
Together, they led a series of workshops with elders from the city who regularly participate in Galvez’s ‘Dance for Parkinsons’ and movement classes for older people. Their sessions explored the relationship between sound, memory, and gesture.
Inviting elders into the gardens outside community centres to practice listening techniques, the group listened to birds, traffic, wind rustling leaves. They listened again via headphones, noticing the change in amplitude and detail and the filtering and selecting of sounds our ears naturally do for us. These experiences with listening triggered memories of sounds for some. As they unpacked these stories, they began to explore gestures and movement in response.
Recordings of these stories triggered by sound were edited into an audio collage which premiered at a ‘listening cinema’ at John Hansard Gallery. Care-fuffle Working Group then developed a creative transcript that translates the entire soundscape of Hannah’s audio collage into words. Listen here and read the transcript (PDF download).
Listening Memories is part of Voices in the Gallery, an AHRC funded research project, with additional support from John Hansard Gallery.
About the creators:
Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a social practice. She produces audio works in community settings, listening and making together. Works often discuss social issues, and involve the people most affected as project collaborators – gathering and sharing testimony and organising activist responses.
Care-fuffle is a constantly evolving, disability-led working group that honours and celebrates the disabled genius and brilliance. Through process-based research, experimentations and practices, we work to build new and more sustainable ecosystems that are actively enacted through ideas of care work, access ecology and DJ, and embed them in a broader social and cultural context.